So here are the most insane SF soaps we could think of — but I bet we missed some good ones. What are your favorites? Pipe up in comments with the lurid details!

Top image by Dennys Ilic. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder.

Heroes

You can pick any character from this show and get a headache trying to figure out all the story twists he or she has gone through. Take Matt Parkman: He's trying to keep his marriage together — No, wait! Now he's living with Mohinder and co-parenting Molly the mutant-detecting girl! — No, wait! Molly is out of the picture! And now Matt is becoming an African-esque shaman! — No, wait! Now Matt is in love with Daphne the speedster, who's the Love Of His Life! — No, wait! Now Matt is back with his wife, and will never think about Daphne again! — No, wait! Etc. etc. etc. My favorite, though, is probably Peter's girlfriend trapped in an alternate dystopian future — whom we will never mention again! Ha ha ha ha urk. (Matt Loves Daphne wallpaper from Fanpop.)

Alias

This show started off pretty coherent — but around the third brainwashing or the tenth revelation that Sidney's mother's cousin was really the spy behind brainwashing Sidney to think her half-sister was a chicken. I defy anybody to explain to me the tangled backstory of the Bristow family.

The Cat Who Walked Through Walls by Robert A. Heinlein:

I made a dreadful mistake: This was the first Heinlein book I ever read — and it may have ruined me for Heinlein forever. In the late Heinlein novels, every character ever shows up, and they mostly have sex together, interspersed with a lot of drama and philosophizing. It's a sequel to The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress as well as Number Of The Beast, and features characters from several other books — including Jubal Harshaw, Lazarus Long and Hazel Stone, and it turns out that all of Heinlein's characters have previously unsuspected connections to each other. As reviewer James W. Harris puts it:

Having all of his "good" guys sound like a convention of smarmy talking wife-swappers is just gross. I hate to sound like a teenage girl, but damn, Heinlein's kissy-kissy talk and innuendo just made me want to puke. And making his classic characters act out in this limp-dick porn flick is just tragic. Having them go on and on about how they were going to kill people for bad manners is just a little psycho to me. Evidently a lot of people and situations annoyed the hell out of Heinlein and he used this book to vent. Some people want to call this satire but I think that's whitewash.

Maybe Heinlein lost his mojo and these multiverse stories were the best he could do. Personally, I thought The Rolling Stones was a perfect novel, and bringing back Hazel Stone was a fictionally fuck-up of an idea, ditto for the cast of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Maybe I am a prude because I just don't want the Hazel Stone, grandmother of Castor and Pollux, joking about being stretched out of shape by giant 25 centimeter cock.

All of Heinlein's personally favorite characters get put into a fictional juicer and blended into weird rabble of sex obsessed mob that chirp a weird innuendo patter and are almost impossible to tell apart. When I read these multiverse stories I can't help but believe that horniness was driving Heinlein crazy. These later stories are preoccupied with sex, killing people, responding to annoying people, the reliability of witnesses, rude people deserving capital punishment, and so on.

Venture Bros.:

At least this show is ridiculous on purpose — the ultra-demented story of the Venture clan has gotten more and more involved, with Sergeant Hatred's struggle against his pedophilic past taking center stage, and deformed clones and weird villain love affairs aplenty. Most of all, there are the labyrinthine family elements crossing over into everything, like the revelation that Dean was also the head of the Guild. The same characters and their families end up being connected in ever more improbable and weird ways, making our heads spin.

Battlestar Galactica:

I have four (or possibly five) words for you: "Hotdog is the father." Whaaa? There's also the great way Baltar went from being a slimy scientist to being a slimy politician to being a slimy cult leader — and what happened to the baby that Baltar and Six were going to have together? Oh and while we're on the subject, what about Saul Tigh being crazy-chicken in love with Caprica Six — until she has a miscarriage, and then he never thinks about her again? It all makes you want to grip your television and scream (in a Krazy Starbuck voice) "You're going the wrong way!"

Sonic The Hedgehog (comics):

According to the always great TVTropes website, this comic-book tie-in to the popular video game went whirling off on crazier tangents than a flying hedgehog on crack. To quote TVTropes:

The Archie Comics Sonic The Hedgehog series twisted Sonic's love life into a Gordian Knot: Originally hooked up with Sally Acorn, she got stuck ruling the country and shoved the relationship to the side to focus on her new duties, prompting Sonic to fall in with Mina Mongoose, starting a rivalry between the two women for Sonic's affection. He then started seeing Fiona Fox on the side, which not only pissed off Mina and Sally, but Tails, as well, who had a crush on her due to falling in love with a robotic duplicate created by Robotnik several years earlier (don't ask). Eventually, Mina got her own boyfriend, Sally got Sonic once again, and Tails got tossed into a brick wall by Fiona, who gave them all the finger to have a relationship with Sonic's evil clone from another universe. And that's not even counting the mini-tangle between Antoine, Sally, Bunnie Rabbot, and Antoine's evil clone from the same universe Fiona's new beau comes from.

Got it? Great.

Gundam Wing:

Okay, let's get this straight... Relena Darlian discovers she's really adopted, and her real name is Relena Peacecraft, one of the last survivors of the pacifistic (duh) Peacecraft tribe. And then it turns out that Zechs Marquise is her long lost older brother. Meanwhile, she gets obsessed with Heero, a young whackjob who keeps announcing he's going to kill her, not unlike the "I'm going to rape you" guy in Welcome To The Dollhouse. And that's just scratching the surface of the most confusing, tangly saga of all time, involving endless backstory and weird family crap.

Angel:

I was going to do Charmed, Angel's fellow WB series which had the whole "my ex-husband is a half-demon" thing, but Angel is so much more ridiculous — mostly because of Cordy, who is in love with Groosalugg, until she's in love with Angel instead, but meanwhile she's turned into a half-demon and then she becomes a Higher Power, until she comes back and has sex with Angel's son — who, as someone points out, is practically her stepson since she helped care for him as a baby — and then becomes pregnant and evil — until she gives birth to an evil god. Nothing on parent show Buffy was as incestuous and ridiculous as Cordy's arc on Angel. Oh, actually, wait — Cordelia was pregnant twice on Angel.

Robotech:

Sure, it was supposedly about the giant mechas, but it was really all about the tragic loves and the tormented Rick-Minmei-Lisa love triangle. To quote Wikipedia,

In early 2013, while sitting at an outdoor cafe, [Lisa] contemplates the love triangle between the three of them when she overhears two men talking about how women were "dealt all the aces" when it comes to relationships, to which Lisa says to herself "that's all you know...here's one woman who would trade every ace in the deck for one Rick Hunter.

Sigh. Twoo Love. Here's a great fanvid featuring the music of White Town. Yay!

X-Men (comics):

This, of course, is the most insane soap opera imaginable. At this point, the X-men have had illegitmate babies from the future, secret love affairs, doomed passions and multiple bad transcriptions of all sorts of accents, from Cajun to Scottish. My favorite ridiculous soap-opera twist might be Madrox's night of passion with two female members of X-Factor: Siryn and Monet, resulting in a pregnancy that isn't quite a normal pregnancy. But then there's also the whole insane Rogue/Gambit thing, the Scott/Jean/Wolverine/Emma love doodaddle, and of course Professor X turning out to be secretly in love with Jean Grey. That's just scratching the surface, really. If you want more info, check out the X-Men relationship map — which is probably already out of date!

Roven talked to IESB about Robotech, and mentioned that there's no script yet. Maguire is producing, but may or may not star. (Most likely, he'll be too busy with the next two Spider-Man films.) Goldsman (I Am Legend, I, Robot, Batman And Robin) is also producing, but it's not clear if he's writing the script.

In the Robotech saga, an alien spaceship crashlands on Earth in 1999, after ten years of devastating global warfare. The crashed ship awakens the Earthlings to the possibility of alien invasion, and everybody rallies around, forming a new world government that marshals all resources to beat a possible alien invasion. Ten years later, the Earth ship is finally ready to launch — just as the first wave of Zentraedi attackers show up. It's up to two young pilots to save the day. Eventually, there are three waves of alien invasion.

Talking about the storyline, Roven said that an alien invasion is the "triggering event" for the movie's plot. So either he's confused about the crashed spaceship thing, or the movie will be different. But he also stressed that there's no script yet, and everything is up in the air. He wouldn't even say for sure whether the movie takes place on Earth. Production design hasn't even started yet, but Roven says it'll be reasonably faithful to the look of the original animated series.

I really hope Goldsman doesn't write the script for this film — his scripts are always a little too glib and preachy for me. I sort of hope they do keep the whole thing about the Earth uniting after the alien spaceship shows up, since it's like a look at the world after the end of Watchmen. But I hope they show the problematic parts of that scenario as well as the rosy ones. Also, I hope they keep the thing where the human culture starts to influence the warlike Zentraedi and "contaminate" the Zentraedi culture, since that could be fun to watch.

[IESB]

Imagi is selling shares in the company for an increase in funding that will hopefully increase its " development of four full-length feature computer graphics imagery animation movies, scheduled tentatively to be released from 2009 to 2011." Imagi is already set to release movies of the classics Astro Boy and Gatchaman. It's probably a safe bet that the other two releases designated for those years (they'll put out a movie every 8 months) will most likely be anime as well.

Hollywood is mad for live action anime remakes: Leonardo DiCaprio's production company and Warner Brothers are set to bring Akira to life, and Stephen Spielberg and DreamWorks are recreating the immensely popular Ghost in the Shell, which will also be 3-D. But I'm most excited for the re-creation of Robotech, and the mecha-warriors of the future.

I'm looking forward to a year of introducing the world of anime to the mainstream audience, I especially would like to see what everyone will think of Takashi Murakami Planting the Seeds feature film.

It's a mere matter of months until we start seeing more American live action flicks with school girl's toting around weaponry Mai HiME style, and is it wishful thinking to hope for a epic fantasy remake of InuYasha? I say the more girls in school outfits blowing up the world, the better.

[CHUD]

Exteel strips the RPG right out of MMORPG. It's all about the fighting. From the main screen, you can set up or join any of the usual modes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Territory Control and a variation called Last Stand that lets you team up to take on computer opponents. Players can form clans and move up a ranking system. Each battle earns you experience points to upgrade your pilot and credits to upgrade your mech. You can also buy NC Coins from publisher NCSoft, which in turn can be used to purchase a new paint job or that sweet Hellrazor Plasma Shotgun.

Running through the tutorials gives you enough credits to upgrade your basic trainee mech, and from there you can spend a little or a lot to outfit your robotic engine of destruction. I've been having a lot of fun with a modest mech I equipped with just a $5 outlay.

With no real storyline to speak of, Exteel is not quite as compelling as, say, a good Battletech MMORPG would be, but it has some high points:

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• Low system requirements. You can run this game on a pretty modest PC rig.
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• Lots of mech customization options. Massive swords, rocket launchers, winged jet packs, and a variety of color schemes are available.
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• Cool maps, including a futuristic sports arena, a city criss-crossed by highways and filled with hoverbuses and laser tanks, a space battleship and high-tech military installation.
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• Purchasable skills. With the right weapons equipped, you can trigger a sweet combo with a single button push, like impaling your opponent with your energy sword, then blasting him point blank with a sub-machine gun before kicking him away. pwned!
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